Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Ryan has been looking at real estate since we were in college, just browsing through listings when we weren't really looking to buy anything was fun, which made me think actually looking for a house would be fun. I was wrong, house hunting is hard, and it costs so much more than you first think it will. You set a budget and think, if we pay this $xxx for the house then the mortgage will only be this $x a month and we can do that no problem. But then you have to add in the property tax and mortgage insurance and all this other stuff. Which in turn brings the budget down and makes it almost impossible to find a house with the number of rooms that we want that isn't in a 55+ community.

We thought we found a good house, it only had 2 bedrooms, but it was 1,700 sq. ft. and right on the Perkiomen creek. Unfortunately the yard was minuscule, even for Jasper it would have been too small and when we get another dog there really wouldn't have been any room for them to run around. Plus Ryan crunched some numbers and it turned out it would have been too far out of our price range anyway. Also not working in our favor is the fact that there are practically NO houses in this area for sale that are anywhere near our price range, I think there is one and its a little smaller than we would like.

So we've been looking at foreclosure listings and bank-owned homes. There is one in particular that we really like, at least from the outside, we haven't seen the inside at all yet. We're gonna talk to a realtor and the bank that owns the house and hopefully we can get it for lower than market value. Plus it has a ton of land and lots of trees, so fingers crossed that this one works out. The only thing that I feel a little bad about is, there are still people living in the house, even though it was foreclosed and the bank owns it, so if we bought it, we'd have to kick them out :(

I've also been watching a lot of HGTV, so I really want to paint some walls, or tile something, it's getting a little ridiculous.